Federal forecasters won’t use winter storm names

In case there was any lingering doubt, the National Weather Service is not down with The Weather Channel’s plan to name winter storms.

Winter Storm Names. (The Weather Channel)

After The Weather Channel named the Nor’easter affecting the upper East Coast today and tomorrow “Athena,” the National Weather Service issued the following note to forecasters:

TWC has named Nor’easter “Athena..” The NWS does not use name winter storms in our products. Please refrain from using the term Athena in any of our products.

That’s pretty terse.

As you may recall, The Weather Channel announced the decision to name winter storms last month. However their criteria for naming the storms is qualitative — for example a large storm hitting a lightly populated area won’t be named, but a smaller storm hitting a metro area would be.

After the announcement competitors such as AccuWeather panned the idea, and the National Weather Service offered no opinion.

With such indefinite rules on what is a named storm and what isn’t, and what constitutes a single storm vs. what happens to be several events happening in the same region, I would be surprised if they’re still doing this in 5 years.

Eric,
I have a better idea. Why not get rid of storm names altogether? I thought that the use of Greek letter designators (2005alpha, 2005beta, 2005gamma, etc.) after the names ran out during the 2005 storm season was exactly the correct approach. Using Greek letter designators for storms would aid in promoting a more dispasionate perspective regarding the storms.

Using human names anthropomorphizes what is simply a physical phenomenon. Do you know whether meteorologists would like this idea?

It’s been the 21st century for over a decade. Let’s get the weather industry to join the rest of us.

Yet another way to generate even more confusion for the general public, which is accustomed to named storms applying to tropical storms only. “So does this mean that Athena was tropical?” The hyping of winter storms will further feed the AGW agenda and also provide fodder for Cowboy here -any rightly so.